1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved data processing system and, in particular, to a method and apparatus for information processing. Still more particularly, the present invention relates generally to recording and analyzing information about the performance of communication sessions between client applications and server applications in a network environment.
2. Description of Related Art
As electronic commerce has matured, enterprises have turned from developing a presence on the World Wide Web to maintaining and improving their e-commerce operations. Most e-commerce enterprises need to provide a high quality of service along with a professional appearance in order to compete effectively with other electronic business services, i.e. e-businesses. A variety of products and services are now commercially available for monitoring characteristics of Web sites via the testing of Web site functionality and the gathering of performance measurement data or metrics.
A significant factor in a customer's satisfaction with an e-business is the response time that is experienced by the customer while engaging in an e-commerce transaction. If a user feels that a e-commerce transaction, such as purchasing a product through a Web site, is relatively slow, the user may become dissatisfied with the Web site and may make subsequent purchases through another Web site. Most e-businesses want to ensure that customers are receiving an appropriate response time, and performance metrics for the operations of an e-business must be gathered in order to determine the response time and other quality-of-service characteristics that might be experienced by a user. Although resource-oriented metrics, such as server load-factors and bandwidth utilization, are important metrics for determining the operational performance of an e-commerce installation, these metrics do not necessarily provide information about the so-called end-to-end response times that a user directly observes with the e-commerce installation. Hence, various methods have been developed to measure end-to-end response times by simulating transactions that a typical user might request through an e-commerce installation.
While discovering average end-to-end response times for a typical user's e-commerce transaction can provide a guide as to whether the response time needs to be improved, such information is usually insufficient for determining the manner in which an e-commerce installation should be modified in order to improve the quality of service. Although many Web sites are supported by relatively simple server configurations, many e-commerce operations have become complex. From a user's perspective, a simple purchase on a Web site may appear to be a single transaction. From an operator's perspective, a user's interactive session with an e-commerce installation involves a set of many operations through many different applications. In other words, a single user interaction may involve a set of transactions, also called a transaction pipeline. The operator of an e-commerce enterprise needs information about each transaction along the transaction pipeline in order to improve poorly performing user interactions.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a method and system for decomposing the operation of a transaction pipeline into distinct transactions such that information can be gathered about each of the many transactions within an e-business installation.